“Read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.”

What’s most important in a friendship? Tolerance and loyalty.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again.

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love.

When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.

Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement.

Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.

You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.

You must accept the reality of other people.

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

A kid can never have too many books!

The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it.

I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.

Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.

The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.